by Stasia Black
Which was nothing compared to what the two men crashing through the woods behind her wanted to do to her.
But goddammit, if she didn’t get free of these bushes, she was never going to get anywhere. She ripped her arm away from the thorn bush that had hold of her, tearing her sleeve off and heading toward an area that looked clearer.
Only to realize once she ran out into an open field that—duh, it was a fucking open field and she’d just made herself a sitting duck.
The man with the rifle was obviously a crack shot. How stupid could she get? Making decisions under this kind of pressure was screwing with her.
Charlie was usually the one who— She didn’t— She couldn’t—
“Shit!” she whispered frantically, spinning around and trying to judge which was the best way to go before realizing she was only wasting more time.
There. The field was narrowest to her left. She started sprinting in that direction. If she could just make it to the woods on the other side, then maybe she could find a place to hide, or just keep one step ahead of—
The ground exploded beside her.
“Shit!” she screamed. Bastard was shooting at her. Guess he’d gotten tired of playing chase.
Cover. She needed cover. She looked frantically around for any trees big enough to shield her, but the field only had a few thin, reedy saplings. None she could hide behind.
And the grass was so high she could barely see where she was stepping. If her ankle turned on a rock, she’d be shit out of lu—
“Ooaf—” she cried, tripping and going down like a stone.
Only to land on a big, warm body.
Her eyes shot open wide and she was about to screech and jerk away, but a huge hand clapped over her mouth.
They had her. Was it the big bastard who’d killed her brother? They must have circled around, one of them shooting at her to distract her while the other—
But when she twisted in the man’s grip, she saw it wasn’t any of the three men she’d seen at the spring with her brother.
No, lying beside and half on top of her was a man even more terrifying. He was easily equal to the other man in size and stature. But this one had a ragged beard, a horrific scar running down the side of his face, and he smelled strongly.
She twisted and fought to get away from him but he just shook her and held his hand over her mouth even more forcefully. He pulled her to him, bearhugging her from behind to hold her still.
“Shhh,” he hissed in her ear.
“Just let me kill the fuckers.”
Audrey’s head jerked to the left at hearing yet another voice. Sure enough, there was a second man crouched down beside them, eyes locked in the direction she’d just come from.
“Commander’d have your ass,” said Scarface. “No unprovoked attacks between us and Travis. You know Article 48 of the new Constitution just as well as I do.”
The other man’s jaw went rigid. “He was chasing an unarmed woman and you know what he would have done if he’d caught her. You call that unprovoked?”
“Enough, Finn,” Scarface snapped. “Move out.” He moved his hand in a sharp, slashing downward motion.
The other man—Finn, apparently—nodded even though he didn’t seem happy about it. He looked one last time at the way Audrey had come before army crawling through the grass.
Scarface finally let his hand off Audrey’s mouth and she scrambled back from him. He grabbed her arm before she could get far. “Listen, if you don’t want to get raped, mutilated, and murdered, not necessarily in that order, you come with us.”
“Let go of me,” she hissed.
His eyes narrowed. “You can’t get out of here on your own. They’ll be on top of us in three minutes. Maybe less. We’ve got a truck. We can get you someplace safe.”
She scoffed at that. Safe didn’t exist anymore. Not when there was only one woman to every twelve or so men.
Still, sitting still in this field would only get her dead. Or captured. Or worse.
One threat at a time.
So she followed Finn’s example and started army crawling through the grass as fast as she could. She gritted her teeth against the burrs and ground thorns tearing at her arm where her sleeve had gotten ripped off.
The New Republic of Texas might be a proud new country but it was a land determined to make you bleed, one way or another. Still, she scrambled as fast as she could. Her life depended on it.
And then before she even knew what was happening, she was suddenly being lifted to her feet. She looked around. They were at a dense copse of trees at the other end of the field.
“Whoa, who’s this gorgeous creature?”
She jerked back from a third stranger who rubbed her red hair back and forth between his fingers.
“Jeffries,” Scarface snapped at the man who’d touched her hair. “You’re scaring her.”
Ha. Ironic coming from Scarface. He looked like the posterchild for brutality. She held her hands up and backed away from all of them.
“Look,” she whispered. “Thanks for helping out, but I’m all good now. I’ll just be going.”
“We don’t have time for this,” Finn said. “Those fuckers are almost on top of us and you can be sure they won’t give a shit about Article 48.”
Scarface nodded and held out his hand.
Audrey was confused.
Until Finn tossed something to him.
A gun.
Shit! Out of the frying pan and into the damn fire.
Audrey turned and again started sprinting like her life depended on it.
But she barely got four steps before she felt a sharp prick in the back of her butt. Just another thorn. No big deal.
She just… had… to… get to…
She collapsed to the ground.
Her last thought was of Charlie’s face before everything went black.
Chapter 3
PHOENIX ‘NIX’
Well shit. Tranquing her wasn’t going to go down well with the Commander. But Finn was right. They needed to get the fuck out of here.
While they were technically in the neutral zone between Travis Territory and Central Texas Sector South, they were closer to Travis’s boundary line than theirs. And Arnold Travis’s bastards would look for any excuse to kill them some Centrals.
Still, Nix took his time when he lifted her from where she’d fallen. He brushed leaves from her hair and some dirt from her cheek.
Fuck but she was beautiful. He didn’t even think it was just because she was the first female he’d touched in more than five years.
Her round face, soft cheekbones, full lips—she’d be beautiful by anyone’s standards. His cock hardened at the warmth of her in his arms as he carried her back to the truck.
Maybe he’d even put his name in for the lottery this time around.
Then he laughed at himself. Going soft now, Nix? More like hard. Jesus, was he finally getting as pussy-starved as every other dumb fuck around?
“Careful,” Finn said, flipping the front seat down and climbing up into the narrow space behind it. Finn flipped down one of the jump seats and reached for the woman. Nix felt oddly reluctant to give her up.
Fucking stupid. He shook his head at himself and handed her off to Finn so he could settle her in.
He turned his attention back to the field behind them and lifted his rifle, eye to the scope.
“You expecting trouble?” Jeffries asked.
“Any second now.”
“Shit.” Jeffries ran around the front of the truck and jumped in the driver’s seat. Only once he was in did Nix drop the rifle and get in the passenger seat.
He barely had the door shut before gunfire came from the trees that had been shielding them from the field.
“Get her down, Finn,” Nix shouted. “And fucking drive!”
“I’m driving,” Jeffries said, jamming the truck in drive and kicking up a cloud of dirt behind him as they took off.
The back window of the cab sh
attered and Nix ducked. Fuckers. He shoved his rifle through the now empty space and started firing back. He wouldn’t hit anyone like this, but some return fire might slow them down.
Soon they’d outdistanced the bastards. Nix swung to look in the backseat. “Is she okay?”
Finn nodded, his face pale. The woman was slumped over, still totally out of it. Finn’s hand trembled when he lifted it to run through his hair.
“They could’ve killed her. Just like that.” He looked up at Nix wide-eyed. “She’s one of the last one’s left and she could’ve just died right in front of me.”
Sometimes Nix forgot just how young Finn actually was. He was what, eighteen? Nineteen? He’d seen so much action, he usually seemed twice that old. Everyone did. Then again, Finn usually just went out on scrapper runs. He hadn’t gone on any of the rescue raids Nix arranged every few months.
Female slavery was officially illegal in the New Republic but the Constitution was only three years old. There were plenty folks who chose to ignore the fact that there was a government back in power at all. Anarchy suited them just fine.
Nix liked the new President of Texas, James Goddard—formerly Colonel Goddard of Fort Worth’s 10th Air Base. After D-Day, everything was fucked.
No one really knew who started nuking who—Xterminate had gone global at that point and women were dying off in millions, billions even. But maybe Russia thought they could contain it in America if they took us off the map? Or vice versa? Who the hell knew?
But the bombs started falling in all the major cities. Three in Texas. Dallas. Austin. Houston. There happened to be a northeasterly wind that week. So Central Texas and Fort Worth were fine. Not even any radiation poisoning from fallout. Just the luck of the damn draw.
But folks in Pflugerville and all the suburbs north of Austin, Houston, and Dallas got fucked. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands in the cities themselves.
And the electrical grid? Hasta la vista.
Simultaneous EMP carpet attacks took care of the rest. The Electromagnetic Pulses fried everything with a circuit board from cell phones to smart cars. Basically, every single modern convenience people relied on for daily life—gone in one stroke.
Fucking technology.
Took them all back to the stone ages.
“How long you think before the lottery?” Jeffries asked, glancing over his shoulder to look back at the woman.
“Eyes on the fucking road,” Nix snapped. “Besides, don’t you already have a woman?”
“Jesus,” Jeffries eyes slid toward him before focusing back ahead of him as the truck finally bounced onto a dirt path that let back to a local highway. “A guy can’t even take a peek at the merchandise? Sheesh. Ain’t like you aren’t thinkin’ about it.”
Nix wasn’t going to dignify that with a response.
But then he remembered Roxy’s scream. His sister’s tiny hand reaching for him as she was ripped out of his arms.
“Actually I wasn’t thinking with my dick because we aren’t the same as them.” Nix jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “We aren’t fucking animals.”
“Whoa,” Jeffries said, eyebrows up as he looked over at Nix. “I was just saying it’s only natural if you were looking to get your thrill drill down there some greasin’ if you know what I mean. We ain’t had a new girl in over two months. Everyone’s getting restless.”
Nix jaw went hard. “You’ll want to stop talking now. You’re just digging yourself fucking deeper.”
Fact was, if the fucker wasn’t driving, Nix might be tempted to introduce his face to a wall. Jeffries was his second in command on the Security Squadron, sure—and at the Commander’s personal request, no less—but that didn’t mean Nix thought the guy wasn’t a weaselly son of a bitch.
Nix took a long breath in and let it out. Jeffries did his job. And really, that was all Nix cared about.
It’s not like you want to date the motherfucker.
No, Nix ate, drank, and slept the job. Keep the Jacob’s Well Township and all the souls who lived there safe—that was it. Full stop. He didn’t do shit like whining about not liking his second in command.
Jeffries rolled his eyes and held his hands up, letting go of the steering wheel.
“Jesus,” Nix shouted, grabbing for the wheel.
Jeffries just laughed and took the wheel, swerving the truck back into their lane from where they’d started drifting onto the shoulder, almost into the ditch.
“Relax, man. You always got a stick up your ass. Ain’t like you’re better’n everyone else.”
Fucker was getting on Nix’s nerves. He pinched the tip of his nose and looked out the window. It was barely noon and already he felt one fuck of a headache coming on.
Should have known he was in for one as soon as he saw he was teamed up with Jeffries on the Scraper team today. The Security rotation—now that one Nix himself scheduled.
And he conveniently gave Jeffries opposite shifts to himself. The fact that these were mostly night shifts was just a tiny little added bonus.
He smirked, thinking how tired Jeffries had looked coming in this morning off a shift. And hey, at least finding the woman meant they could head back early.
Nix glanced over his shoulder again at her. Now that they were out of the range of fire, Finn had settled her in the narrow jump seat opposite his.
Her head was tipped back, mouth slack. Her shocking red hair was tangled all to hell and dirt streaked her face, but goddamn she was beautiful. It struck him all over again. Those soft apple cheeks, her plump, inviting lips…
Fuck. His jeans were starting to get tight again. He jerked back around front and ground his teeth. She was nothing to him.
As soon as he got her back to town, he’d barely ever see her again. And that was the way it was meant to fuckin’ be.
Continue Reading Theirs to Protect
About The Authors
STASIA BLACK grew up in Texas, recently spent a freezing five-year stint in Minnesota, and now is happily planted in sunny California, which she will never, ever leave.
She loves writing, reading, listening to podcasts, and has recently taken up biking after a twenty-year sabbatical (and has the bumps and bruises to prove it). She lives with her own personal cheerleader, aka, her handsome husband, and their teenage son. Wow. Typing that makes her feel old. And writing about herself in the third person makes her feel a little like a nutjob, but ahem! Where were we?
Stasia’s drawn to romantic stories that don’t take the easy way out. She wants to see beneath people’s veneer and poke into their dark places, their twisted motives, and their deepest desires. Basically, she wants to create characters that make readers alternately laugh, cry ugly tears, want to toss their kindles across the room, and then declare they have a new FBB (forever book boyfriend).
A.S. GREEN is the author of erotic novellas (Real Man, Rough Ride) and new-adult novellas and full-length romances (Making Waves, Summer Girl, Wild Child). She lives in the cold, upper-Midwest with her husband and three mostly grown children, usually hunkered down with a good book. You can find her on the interwebs at asgreenbooks.com and @asgreenbooks. Say hello and follow on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Book Bub, Goodreads, etc.
